SIMON SHEIKH

SPACES FOR THINKING

Perspectives on the Art Academy

Artists with a Ph.D.! - this should only tingle the spines of

conservatives, right? Wrong: The shifts resulting from the so-
called ”Bologna process" with its creation of a European
standardization of academic studies in the fields of institutional
art history as well as art education in academies hit hardest where
the general significance of methodologies is at stake. Under the
buzzword of an ”artistic research", currently many things
resurface in a canonized format that former generations of artists
had fought for as principles of self-empowerment: to do research
on your own account, without having to justify your doings in the
face of Academia and its limitations. Is it only rhetorical to ask
what artists not operating within the ideal of ”research" will be
doing in the near future? What - apart from short-term
displacements of funding - can result from the ”scientific
challenge" to the field of art?

The challenges for artistic education today are indeed many. Some
would claim that art education is at a crossroad between tradition and
innovation, others that we are in a crisis of legitimation and
methodology, perhaps parallel to a general institutional crisis of
society, or even of global capitalism. A crisis not unlike the one that
haunted my original field of study, or background, art history, in the
1980s. Here, there was a huge methodological crisis or even battle
between traditional empirical and descriptive approaches towards
influences from sociology, epistemology, post-structur-alism and
feminism. It was a question of whether the discipline was self-
contained, its object of study and methods hereof a (pre)given or
whether it was a discipline that had a theory of its object of study - as
is the Althus-sserian definition of science. Indeed, the discipline itself
became the object of art-historical research: the history of art history
(in an epistemological sense), now a subgenre filling numerous
volumes. And it is now no longer possible to study the art object, the
history and sociology of art without a reflection of the mode of study
itself, without an auto-critique and certain notions of
interdisciplinarity. Such reflections and history lessons are of value to
us today, in an evaluation of the education of artists, or what we, in
broader and perhaps more accurate terms, could call cultural
producers.1. Especially since art academies may or may not be in a
particular kind of crisis, but are at the same time hugely successful.
Not only are artists, as I will return to shortly, branching out, as it
were, into many other fields and disciplines, but also within the
artworld itself are academies prevalent, if not hegemonic. If one looks
at contemporary galleries, museums and international biennials, the
artists represented here are almost exclusively all academy-trained, a
huge difference to the ratio of just, say, twenty or thirty years ago. In
this specific sense, art schools and academies have never been more
effective or even successful in the influence on the art world and art
production in general. Whereas most modernist art movements clearly
happened outside or even in opposition to academies and academia,
we have witnessed a merger between the academy, critical theories
and discourses, museal representations and the market, although
often in contradictory and even antagonistic terms. We therefore have
to ask ourselves not only what system we are educating people within,
but also, crucially, which system are we educating people for?

In the current debates on the development of artistic education, and

more specifically the implementation of the Bologna process2. -
meaning a European standardization of the Anglo-American academic
structure of ba, ma and PhD degrees - we are witnessing a similar
dichotomy to the one that plagued art history in the 1980s, between
traditional, given modes and newer, interdisciplinary methods and
approaches. As in the struggle between, or shift from, old to new art
history, we see a conflict between the old master-student relation and
a course-based system on the one hand, and between a (in)formal
studio practice discourse and theoretical influxes and critiques on the
other. In these forms of learning specific notions of art production -
as well as the production of the artist-subject, are implicit:- as
creation or construction, respectively. This dichotomy, or struggle, if
you will, is happening on two fronts; in the educational system itself
and in contemporary art production, with the former somewhat
following or reflecting the latter. In contemporary art practices we can
see a certain "permissiveness”, an interdisciplinary approach where
almost anything can be considered an art object in the appropriate
context, and where more than ever before there is work being
produced with an expanded praxis, intervening in several fields other
than the traditional art sphere, touching upon such areas as
architecture and design, but also philosophy, sociology, politics,
biology, science and so on. The field of art has become a field of
possibilities, of exchange and comparative analysis. It has become a
field for alternatives, proposals and models, and can, crucially, act as
a cross field, an intermediary between different fields, modes of
perception and thinking, as well as between very different positions
and subjectivities.

Art thus has a very privileged, if tenable and slippery, but crucial
position and potential in contemporary society. Such expanded
practices emerged, as we know, in the 1960s and 1970s, but have
become much more prevalent in the 1990s, and where they were
originally in a dialogical/oppositional relationship with the tradition of
art and its institutions, it is today more fully institutionalized, and only
secondarily in opposition via its formats, which is why it was termed
respectively "contextual” and "relational” by territorializing theorists
Peter Weibel and Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990s.3. Art is as often
purely a place or even pretext for communication and action, as it is
an end in itself, hence recent buzzwords such as platform, plateau and
project. This is neither the time nor place to discuss the merits of such
projects and language games, but rather to point to a profound shift
in the conception of art as objects and contexts, as well as of the
artists as subject and producer. We therefore need new tools, not only
in an art historical sense, but also in terms of the education of artists
as a discipline and institutional space. Perhaps it is also in this context
that we should view the emergence of a term such as "artistic
research”, one of the buzzwords in the current discussions around art
education and the modular model: on the one hand research seems
implied by certain artistic practices, and on the other it seems to
academically validate artistic work processes as such. We are dealing
with a transferal of terms, since we are not just talking about
"research” as such, as in other fields, but with the prefix "artistic”
added. That is, something additional and specific to the field of art.
One must thus inevitably ask what kind of practices does not involve
artistic research? What practices are privileged, and which are
marginalized or even excluded? Does research function as a different
notion of artistic practice(s) or merely a different wording, validation
process and contextualization that can mold and place artistic work
within traditional university structures of knowledge and learning?

Often, but not always, in such dematerialized, post-conceptual and,

perhaps more accurately termed, re-contextualized art practices,
there is of course a notion of research invoked. Research has even, to
some extent, superceded studio practice. Artists are increasingly
researching projects, not only to make site-specific works, but also
time and content specific works. Here, form follows function, and the
materialization of the work is decided upon different parameters than
in historical studio practice. For example, the introduction of
documentary strategies into artistic practice over the last decade or
so, naturally requires very different skills and methodologies than a
traditional studio practice, but also - alongside the so called project
exhibition - implying potentially very different goals and scopes. To a
certain extent, it is the issue at hand rather than the end product of an
art object that is primary. Studio practice has by no means
disappeared, though, especially not from the art market, instead
several conceptions of art practice seem to co-exist, and the battle
lines between different artistic and political positions can not be
mapped out only in formal ways, as was the case in early modernism.
However, it is obvious that re-contextualized art practices are not
resting upon the same pillars of tradition as the historical art
academy, if on any, and it is clear that such practices are increasingly
present within the art academies, both in terms of teachers and
students, but not necessarily visible in the structural framework of the
art academies themselves. Why is this so? And will they find their place
more easily in the modular system?

Perhaps, as we are continuously discussing new models of art

production and institutions, we should also discuss new models of art
educational facilities, both in terms of architecture, structure and
curricula. It is clear that the interdisciplinary must necessarily stand in
opposition to a traditio-nal division of art practices into particular
genres or indeed disciplines, such as "painting” or the no longer so
new "new medias”, to name but a few. In order to address the
situation that contemporary young artists, or cultural producers, face,
we cannot rest on the pillars of tradition, neither within institutions,
art production or methods of teaching. On the contrary, tradition
seems quite counter-productive to our current endeavor: the
assessment of new skills and tools for a re-contextualized art
practice. So, if we view art production as knowledge production rather
than formal production, we will have to develop and define a different
set of properties and parameters for discussion, production and
evaluation. And when we focus on art as a place "where things can
happen” rather than a thing "that is in the world” we will see how an
engagement between art production and critical theory becomes
necessary and the education itself a multi-facetted interdisciplinary
field that moves in many spaces as opposed to staying within one
mode of production, or form. This is not to say that thinking doesn’t
take on a formal articulation or that research is always equal to art
production, quite the contrary, since it is our particular property to
understand content as form and vice versa. But the important shift
that I want to emphasize is perhaps best described by Jean-François
Chevrier, who has written of an "art conquering space”, as it were,
since the 1960s, that has facilitated a shift in emphasis from art
objects to what he calls "public things”.4. This indicates how notions of
audience, the dialogical, modes of address and conception(s) of the
public sphere(s) have become the important points in our orientation,
and what this entails in form of ethics and politics.

This shift also entails, naturally, different notions of communicative

possibilities and methods for the artwork, where neither its form,
context nor spectator is fixed or stabile: such relations must be
constantly (re)negotiated, and conceived in notions of publics or
public spheres. This means, on the one hand, that the artwork itself
(in an expanded sense), is unhinged from its traditional forms (as
material) and contexts (galleries, museums etc.), and on the other
hand, is made contingent on a(nother) set of parameters that can be
described as spaces of experience, that is, notions of spectatorship
and the establishment of communicative platforms and/or networks in
or around the artwork that are contingent on, and changing according
to different points of departure in terms of spectatorship. The gaze of
the spectator is, of course, not only dependent on the work and its
placement, but also on the placement of the spectator socially (in
terms of age, class, ethnic background, gender, politics etc.). Or, more
broadly speaking, experiences and intentionalities. In turn, work,
context and spectator influence the definition of each other. None of
which are given, and each of which are potentially conflictual, indeed
agonistic: One may or may not feel addressed, may or may not accept
the mode of address, even, by a given work or a given situation (both
artwise and socio-politically). When thinking about art production and
representation, it is therefore crucial to negotiate these terms both
individually and in relation to each other. We must, then, think of art
in terms of a triadic model, rather than in terms of dialectics (such as
form and content, tradition and desire, meaning and non-meaning,
and so on). To the extent that such a model was presaged by parts of
historical conceptualism, we are as much within an post-conceptual as
postmodern era.

A contemporary investigation of how art and artists are produced

must thus reconfigure the terms of theory and practice in a different
way, and explore both what can be termed the practice of theory and
the theories of practice (historical and current): What exactly is
involved in an act of representation? What is, for instance, the
relationship between artistic practice and political representation, that
is, two different notions of representation? What are the possible
positions within the artistic field for political representations and
perhaps even actions, and which modes are productive and which
counter-productive? And, furthermore, what is the relationship
between the claimed autonomy of the artwork, and claims for political
autonomy? But also: what is the relationship between representation
and depresentation?5. What are the correlations between strategies
and formal expressions? What are, for example, the trappings and
potentials of collective works and groupings compared to the role of
the singular artist? How do you define your work vis-à-vis the
apparatus surrounding art production and presentation? What is the
public role of the artist, historically, presently and potentially? These
discussions must revolve around the various tools and methods of
representation available to us: how we can conceive of var-ious modes
of address, and how new narratives, and in turn subjectivities, can be
constructed? This is also an adequate moment to repeat the classical
question: To and for whom do we speak? And what are the differences
in our conceptions and invocations of various notions of institutions,
audiences, constituencies and communities?

If we look at the academy itself we have been handed down certain

historical models, the idea of "free art” and the master class, namely
one professor talking to multiple students and deciding what art
education is. In terms of mode of address this is, of course, a pre-
democratic model, a non-dialogical mode of address, based on the
sovereign reigning his subjects, listening attentively to his master’s
voice (an inherently hierarchical and masculinist subject positioning).
However, if artists are now to be engaged with the world and not just
themselves and their desirous relationship to a tradition - which was,
famously, Norman Bryson’s definition of academism in classical art -
we must question the relevance of this model and perhaps look more
closely at the university model of several lecturers and certain
curricula as instigated by the Bologna process. If we view the academy
as a "teaching machine”, to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak, we must ask,
then, what kind of subjects (i. e. the students) and what kind of
knowledge (i. e. the teaching) is produced. Presently, this has a
heightened urgency, since we are importing the Anglo-American
university system onto the traditional European academy model. It
would be illusory to think that the implementation of a modular
system will in itself solve the problems and grievances we have with
the historical master class. One will merely substitute a system of
discipline with a system of control: whereas the traditional educational
system is part of the disciplinary society, the new methods of
examination, modules and internalization, can be seen as part of a
society of control. Power is no longer exercised through discipline, as
it is very concretely in the traditional academy with its disciplinarily
themed departments and sovereign professors, but rather through a
simultaneous diffusion of this power, making it less visible and
personally identifiable, but double enforceable through various
mechanisms of control and (self)surveillance, where you individually
have to choose your course work, but according to a modular system
installed in advance, and with various instances of evaluation and
examination. This "educational system” of control is continued after
graduation, of course, through how your work processes and advance
in the artworld, or generalized field of cultural production, is
structured.6.

In this sense, the notion of the cultural producer, a contemporary

artist figure, can be seen as complicit with these later developments
within administration, politics and capital. The artists are a sort of
social avant-garde, on the forefront of the risk society and the notion
of immaterial laborers. As producers of knowledge universities are
often mere teaching machines, reproducers rather than producers of
knowledge and thinking, which is why we should not uncritically adopt
their structures. Rather, one should learn from those structures as
spaces of experience, as discursive spaces, and simultaneously to the
implementation of its productive features, maintain the notion of
unproductive time and space, which was potentially hidden in the
academy model: where the traditional professorial reign meant that
the professor in charge decided on methods and curricula (if any), he
or she could naturally also allow for the students to do whatever they
wanted, even doing nothing. Such is the total power of the sovereign:
to be a good king or a bad king … Reversely, the students could also
take charge themselves and directly overthrow their professors in
place revolutions (as inspired by the student riots of 1968), as actually
witnessed in art schools throughout the 1990s, where students
created so called "free classes”, professor-less departments run by the
students themselves. One should maintain such notions of a free
space, of the laboratory, something that is not implied in strict course
work and evaluation schemes. In this sense one has to move beyond
knowledge production into what we can term spaces for thinking.
Thinking is, after all, not equivalent to knowledge. Whereas knowledge
is circulated and maintained through a number of normative practices
- disciplines as it were - thinking is here meant to imply networks of
indiscipline, lines of flight and utopian questionings. Naturally,
knowledge has great emancipatory potentials, as we know from
Marxism through psycho-analysis, but knowledge, in the sense being
what you know, what you have learned, is also a limitation: something
that holds you back, that inscribes you within tradition, within certain
parameters of the possible. And thus with certain eliminations of what
it is possible to think, possible to imagine - artistically, politically,
sexually and socially. Secondly, the notion of knowledge production
implies a certain placement of thinking, of ideas, within the present
knowledge economy, i. e. the dematerialized production of current
post-Fordist capitalism. And here we can see the interest of capital
become visible in the current push for standardization of (art)
education and its measurability, and for the molding of artistic work
into the formats of learning and research. There is a direct corollary
between the dematerialization of the art object, and thus its potential
(if only partial) exodus from the commodity form and thus
disappearance from the market system, and the institutional re-
inscription and validation of such practices as artistic research and
thus knowledge economical commodity. Obviously, even
dematerialized artistic practices can be bought and sold as
commodities on the art market, if the marketing of the artist figure -
as hipster, as creator, as innovator - is done forcefully and strongly by
the right agents, i. e. specific high end galleries. (The artists as pure
sign value, we could even say, rejoicing with almost forgotten
postmodern guru Jean Baudrillard …)

In institutional terms, we have seen this witnessed in the merge

between art, economy, fashion and academies in the uk, exemplified
by the Thatcherite transformation of the art educational system into a
cultural industrial complex, reaching its apex with the hegemonic
position of Gold-smiths College and the Young British Artists
generation of artists in England in the 1990s.7. A similar tendency can
be seen in other places and institutions (such as Yale and now
Columbia University in the United States), and shows how the Anglo-
American system of education, capital and culture, along with general
political implementations of deregulation and state control, are
exported from the us through the uk and into Europe. Internation-
alization and harmonization of education also mean a normalization,
and a possibility of transforming the educational sector into a
competitive market. It is, in these cases - and one could easily
mention European schools as well - quite obvious which system artists
are educated for as well as within: one and the same. However, as
indicated, it is also possible to think of education as a process of
thinking, of unlearning certain modes of knowledge and production
and subjectivity, of questioning these very structures rather than
embracing them. It should be possible to think of educational spaces
that are produced through subjectivities rather than merely producers
of them. Or put in other words, not just producing artworld artists, but
rather positions within as well as without the art world and its
repetitious economies of galleries, collectors, markets, careerings,
reifications, trends and circuits.

Anmerkungen:
1. I am using the term cultural producers for two reasons, first to escape the
limitation of art as object-based and market-driven, and secondly in order
to refer to the larger framework of an entertainment or cultural industry, in
which art production is now thoroughly based. So, on the one hand an
unhinging from historical categories and limitations, and on the other a
newer circumscription and delimitation.
2. The Bologna process refers to a eu declaration on education from 1999,
which has been signed by 29 European countries so far. The goal is to create
a European University standard of education, allowing for movement
between countries and faculties, using the same ects point system and the
standardization of the Anglo-American system of Bachelor and Masters
degrees, following by a possible PhD in a so called three plus two plus three
modular system. Within art education, there is currently a pan-European
discussion on whether to follow this model, already in place in Great Britain,
or whether to keep the traditional Franco-Germanic model of the art
academy, without modules, but with each student attending the class of one
professor, whose department is defined according to a specific artistic
discipline (traditionally painting and sculpture department, and today most
often with new media, video, public space etc. departments added for good
measure).

3. See Peter Weibel (ed.), Kontext Kunst, Köln 1994, and Nicolas Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics / Esthétique relationelle, Dijon 1998.

4. The movement from object to public things, events, installations,

utterings, situations etc. has been eloquently described by Jean-François
Chevrier in his book The Year 1967. From Art Objects to Public Things, Or
Variations on the Conquest of Space, Barcelona 1997.

5. By representation we mean a double movement of absence and presence,

politically that someone is present somewhere, representing others that are
absent, and artistically transferal and transformation in the sense of the
emergence of an idea or sensation within an object, placed somewhere
(else). By depresentation, we are referring to the opposite movement, a
presence or emergence that is removed or even erased. Something that can
no longer be represented. It is thus not a matter of a discourse or subject
position that cannot emerge in a given hegemony (as the ways in which the
subaltern cannot speak), but rather of an active and effective removal of
certain ideas and speech acts from the visible, from the possible, from the
system of representation and signification as such.

6. Moving beyond the artworld and even the larger cultural industrial sphere,
we will find that one of the political catchwords of post-Fordist, and even
post welfare societies of core Europe is indeed "education for life”, meaning
education as an ongoing process, constant deskilling and reskilling of labor,
as well as a mode of production and productivity itself.

7. Interestingly, a generation of artists that were all academy trained and

socialized, indeed connected to the market, media and gallery system
through the academy, emerged publicly as anti-academic in the sense of
being anti-theoretical. The effects of the ba and ma system does not, then,
indicate an increase in theoretical academic discourse, but is equally capable
of maintaining and even cultivating the reactionary anti-theoretical artist
subject of the traditional art academy. The main common feature, obviously,
is connections: how artists enter the marketplace, i. e. the dealers-collectors
network and economy of desire.